The First 90 Days: The Complete Guide for Executive Assistants

For Executive Assistants and PAs starting a new role or starting a new partnership with a new principal.

The first ninety days of an EA partnership are not a trial period. They are the foundation of a professional relationship that, at its best, can be one of the most extraordinary working partnerships either person will ever experience.

What separates the EAs who flourish from those who struggle is almost never what's on their CV. It is how they listen, how they communicate, and how they quietly build the trust that lets a principal lean on them without checking first.

This is the guide to that work. Not a checklist. A framework for building trust, demonstrating judgement, and becoming indispensable, before anyone has asked you to prove yourself.

What's inside

→ Before You Begin - the work that starts before day one: research, questions, intentions

→ Days 1–30 · Listen. Learn. Land. - build the foundation through careful listening and small, visible reliability

→ Days 31–60 · Consolidate. Confirm. Connect. - deepen the partnership and add your perspective

→ Days 61–90 · Establish. Evolve. Lead. - set the long-term terms for who you'll be in this role

→ For the Principal - a dedicated section to share with the executive on the other side of the desk, on how they can show up to make it work

→ Tools & Templates - the 30, 60, and 90-day email templates, the Intelligence Map, the Open Questions Bank, and the 90-day self-review

It is built to be worked through slowly, returned to often, and adapted to your voice and your situation. Read it on day one. Come back to it at thirty days, sixty days, and ninety days. Your answers will surprise you.

Who wrote this and how we know it works

This guide is not theory. We have lived it from both sides of the desk.

Lily Shippen has spent over thirteen years placing Executive Assistants and Personal Assistants in senior roles, watching, time after time, what separates the partnerships that thrive from the ones that quietly fall apart in the first ninety days.

Emily Partridge spent fifteen years as an award-winning Executive Assistant before managing sixty EAs globally. When she joined Lily's recruitment business as Operations Manager, she sent the now-famous thirty-day email that opens this book. The same pattern of behaviours described in these pages is the one that, over the years that followed, took her from a Operations Manager to Head of Growth and Initiatives and then to Managing Director of eavolve. The framework is built from what has actually worked.

Format: 58-page PDF, including four working templates and dedicated reflection workbooks for days 30, 60, and 90.